the parent of my child is my friend
by altschmerz
Summary: May wakes up sick the day after Peter does and, because somehow she is no longer navigating the world as a single parent, texts Tony to come over and get Peter, in order to care for him until one or both of them are recovered. Tony comes over, but not to take Peter and leave. He's arrived to take care of both of them, and shockingly, he's not the worst at it. (gen, pre-iw)


_i'm out here writing mcu sickfic while listening to fall out boy like it's 2015 or something. i love fic where may and tony somehow end up friends and there's not enough of it, so here's my humble contribution._

 _also for the record, i love csi very much, and all shittalking of it is done with utmost fondness._

 _let me know what you think! this is, as i mentioned, my first attempt writing anything mcu since literally 2015, and i hope i've done them some semblance of justice._

 _for my h/c bingo wildcard, 'minor illness/injury'. rated for language, i guess._

* * *

It would not be an unfair assessment to say that May Parker never liked Tony Stark. She'd heard of him, of course, and things got… interesting, after Iron Man, waters and opinions muddied, but he was never exactly prominent on her radar. He was an annoyance at best, a reason to roll her eyes and change the channel. He was, "and this week, Iron Man-" [click], "and after an incident where Iron Man-" [click], "Iron Man-" _[click]._

Then he was sitting on her couch, and suddenly Iron Man was Mr. Stark, who offered her nephew an internship and maybe the reality of him was better than the news segment, what did she know. Then he was Mr. Stark, who had something to do with why Peter was so upset, and she was back to disliking him. And then Mr. Stark who was letting her fifteen year old run around fighting crime in a jumpsuit, and for a good week, she hated his guts.

And then, well… and then he was Mr. Stark, sitting on her couch again, and they had a long, long conversation, and things were different after that. For starters, he wasn't Mr. Stark any more, he was Tony, and his number was programmed into her speed dial, and isn't this just not the way she ever predicted her life would turn out. She has a kid that isn't hers, except he is in every way that counts, and she's got some weird relationship with Tony freaking Stark where she texts him on a Thursday afternoon - on his very private personal number - to pick Peter up from school because a good friend called in to work and May owes her one. And then, without complaining about his schedule or anything, he does it.

Which is what brings May Parker to the circumstances in which she currently finds herself. Or, more accurately, what brings May to her decided upon response to her current circumstances.

When she wakes up that morning, it is to the rock-in-the-pond sinking sensation that yes, she has in fact caught whatever had Peter laid up yesterday, and yes, true to his depiction, it is in fact 'hell, and also the worst'. May feels like someone has driven a Mack truck onto her chest, and she's alternating between so hot she may sweat out of her skin and so cold no amount of blankets will solve the problem. On top of this, she feels the kind of hungry you get when you're sick, where you know you should eat something but you also feel like the amount of steps involved is just too much for your energyless state, and the reward (food) not worth the risk (energy expended, having to get out of bed, possible… return of whatever it is you ate).

Needless to say, the last thing May wants to do today is get up. She'd already called in to work the night before, arranging cover for a couple days from a couple of friends who alternately owed her one and understood her circumstances. This had been thanks to Peter being sick and miserable, before she knew that she'd end up coming down with the same thing, and be reduced to never wanting to move again. Unfortunately for her, single parents with sick children do not get to make that call, their own illnesses notwithstanding.

Except. Hang on a minute.

May risks extending a hand out of her blanket cocoon, now being one of the 'it's suddenly midwinter in my apartment' spells, to flop it around in search of her cellphone. After knocking it off her nightstand and taking a moment to contemplating crawling back into the blanket cocoon and giving up on life entirely, then picking it up, May squints at the screen. First things first, check with Peter.

Within seconds, an affirmative response with more enthusiasm in the text than May really thinks is accurate to his current physical state. It certainly does a lot to relieve any guilt she may or may not have been feeling about her newly formulated plan.

She doesn't have to scroll through her messages at all to reach her conversation with Tony. Somehow the combination of not talking to especially many people and talking to Tony with a staggering degree of frequency has landed him consistently in the top couple of message threads, and in the top three somewhere of suggested recipients when she opens a new message. May types out a text and sends it, hoping it makes sense to someone whose brain isn't currently addled by illness.

 _me:_  
 _Hey, do you mind coming to get Peter and taking care of him for a bit? He's sick._

A few minutes later, not as quickly as Peter had answered but still more swift than May had been expecting, an answer.

 _tony:_  
 _I mean you know I will, but you're a nurse, I'd have expected you'd want all the chances to fuss at him while he's captive that you could get._

May snorts.

 _me:_  
 _Normally yes, I'm all over it, but whatever it is, I've got it too, and all I feel like doing today is vegetating and watching CSI. It's nothing serious but I don't feel like I'm in the best caretaking state. I could manage, of course. Don't worry about it if it's a problem._

Almost instantly.

 _tony:_  
 _Never a problem._

 _tony:_  
 _Be there in 30._

After a few moments of laying face down in bed, guiltily relieved that she doesn't have to try and take care of a sick teenager while battling the head cold from hell herself, May drags herself out of bed. She figures she might as well be present and semi-upright when Tony gets to the apartment. Peter, when she pokes her head into his room, is once again out for the count, his phone on his blanket-covered chest.

Shaking her achy, clouded head, May continues to force her exhausted body down the hallway to the couch, upon which she unceremoniously collapses. She's a medical professional. She understands how illnesses like these ones work. They're minor but they suck the life out of you. Despite this, May still finds herself forlornly wondering how she can be this tired when she literally _just_ woke up. It's an effort just to pick the remote off the side table. Thankfully the disk is already in - she had been watching television the night before as well.

She's maybe halfway through an episode when there's a knock at the door and she has to drag herself off the couch that, in the split second following the knock, has become the world's most comfortable surface, to answer it.

"You have a _key_ ," she reminds him, feeling a little peevish at having to get off the world's most comfortable couch just to open a door he could've opened just fine.

"For emergencies, yeah, I didn't want to just barge in," Tony replies, as if he has ever before in his life cared about manners or decorum. He walks past her with a couple large grocery bags and she stares after him.

"You look like shit, by the way," he calls over his shoulder as he walks into the kitchen.

"Thanks, Tony."

"Did I say that? What I meant to say is you look stunning, as always."

When he returns, it is without most of the items he'd brought with him. There's a box of tissues stuck under one arm, and a box of what appears to be Tylenol Cold and Flu Severe in the same hand. In the other hand there is, balanced precariously, two glasses of orange juice. Absolutely nothing about this equation makes sense, and May squints at Tony, who sets a glass of juice on the side table next to her before crossing to the other end of the couch and dropping down onto it.

"What are you doing?" she asks after a while. Tony fumbles with the packaging.

"I am getting you a dose of…" He twists the box around and squints at the label. "Tylenol Cold & Flu Severe. You're not allergic to this are you? I got like, seven different kinds of over the counter cold and flu stuff. Did you know there's like seven different kinds? It's absolute insanity."

May has a sudden mental image of Tony Stark standing in a pharmacy with an extremely confused pharmacy employee standing next to him, completely overwhelmed by the number of options available to him to address nature's most annoying affliction on humanity. It's an amusement point that only lasts for a few seconds before May is back to her original question.

"I'm not allergic to Tylenol. No, I mean, what are you doing in my house?"

He blinks at her, handing her the little packet and gesturing at the orange juice. "I'm enticing you to take medicine so you don't feel like absolute garbage. Unless you've already taken something in which case wait…" Tony flips the package over again. "Approximately four hours."

May has not in fact taken anything since waking up less than an hour ago, and so accepts the pills. They've got a sweet, chalky taste that she barely registers, for all that her mouth feels stuffed of cotton. Once she's washed it down with orange juice, May narrows her eyes at Tony.

"Okay, I've taken the medicine, now answer my question and stop being a smartass." It would probably be an order with more weight if her voice didn't sound scratchy and exhausted and she wasn't curled up on her couch under a duvet with a freeze frame of CSI overlooking the conversation.

"Look," Tony sighs, turning to the side and flopping one leg up over another. He's dressed casually, and if it weren't for his recognizable face, it would be easy to mistake him for just some guy. Not a billionaire, not a genius, not an Avenger. Just some guy who brought seven different kinds of cold medication and orange juice with him to her apartment because she and her nephew were sick. "I said I would come over, but I didn't say I'd just take Peter and leave. I'm happy to take care of Peter. You know I am, any time, but you're sick too, and I figure hey, may as well come take care of both of you while I'm at it."

"You're going to take care of us," May repeats, not entire sure she's comprehending this right. She is, after all, running a pretty good fever. "You, Tony 'Iron Man' Stark, are going to take care of _two_ gross sick people, _willingly_?"

Tony makes a face at that, and May, given her current state, is having a bit of a difficult time picking apart what it means. It's one she's seen on him before. Not often, but not never either. It's uncertain and peculiar, and she doesn't know how to name it. It passes quickly.

"Well," Tony says, and there's more bravado in his voice than in his face, but that's typical, "I may not have a _ton_ of experience in this area, but after copious research of the fictional variety and of the kind that involves watching Barton chase his rugrats around, I've come to the conclusion that taking care of people when they're sick is the kind of thing you're supposed to do for family."

"Family," she repeats, without thinking.

"Yeah, I mean, at this point that's what we-" He cuts himself off mid-sentence, eyes going wide. The look is back and this time it lingers. "Oh," he says, voice like an engine stuttering. "Oh, shit, um. Sorry. Mis-called that one, totally my bad, I've never been good at, y'know-"

"Oh, shut up," May says, dropping her head back onto the couch and closing her eyes. "Family's right." Only family could make her feel this simultaneously endeared and irritated, that's for sure. "The parent of my child is my friend or whatever."

In all honesty, May would have to admit she dropped that one in a large part just to see how he'd react to it. She cracks an eye open and watches. It's probably just a placebo effect, but it feels like the Tylenol is starting to kick in, clearing her head enough to focus on the strange conversation she's stumbled into. She'd predicted he'd look one of two ways and as it turns out, it's a mixture of both.

On one hand, there's the same look from earlier, the one she's got no name for. On the other hand, there's the look she's grown to like on him, her favorite of the faces she's seen him make. It's soft, and there are crows feet at the corners of his eyes, a slight smile making itself seen more there than on his mouth. It's a kind of fondness that May has felt before, looking at Peter.

Tony looks at Peter like that, too. May has seen him look at Peter like that, and maybe that's what finally won her over, what lays at the core of the fact that she finds herself talking to him when it isn't about Peter too, when she doesn't _have_ to. He's got a heart, a big one, and somewhere along the way of her nephew staking his claim to a large part of it, May seems to have found herself a place there too.

He's sitting here on her couch, plying her with Tylenol and orange juice, after all.

"Parent of your child, huh?" It's not just his face, it's in his voice too, both the things she'd identified in his expression. There's something else there as well, something tentative, footfalls across ice of unknown thickness.

May responds with a directionless wave of her hand. Her symptoms might have abated somewhat thanks to the magical properties of over the counter cold medicine, but it's done absolutely nothing for the exhaustion. She doesn't have the bandwidth to sort through this right now if it becomes a crisis, so she hopes that if she sets the example of nonchalance, Tony will take the easy route for once in his life and follow along.

"If the shoe fits," she says, and the ball inelegantly thumps into his court.

There's a split second, and then a quiet chuckle, warm and a little awkward. "I'll drink to that," he says, raising his glass of orange juice in a mock toast. "Now, what are we watching?"

"We're watching CSI." May squints at the info bar that had appeared when she'd first paused the episode. "Season two." Taking the question as her cue, she grabs the remote off the couch cushion and resumes the episode.

"I gotta say, I did not have you pegged as a crime procedural kind of girl, May," Tony comments while some early-2000's techno music plays over a scene of some almost-definitely made up scientific analysis.

"You got me," she mumbles in return, mostly focused on the tv, and on not giving in to the rising urge to cough, "I'm a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside-"

And the fight against coughing is lost. May succumbs to what feels like her lungs attempting to race each other to burst out of her chest first. She feels hands on her, one grasping her shoulder the other on her back, supporting her into a more upright position. It helps to ease her breathing, and the coughing fit soon subsides, leaving her slumped back against the couch, boneless and worn out.

"Inside somebody with the plague," he finishes for her after several beats of 2000's techno-filled quiet.

"Do not make me laugh right now," she rasps.

For a while, his hand stays there on her blanket-draped back. It pats absently a few times before stilling and just resting there while they watch the show together. They make it through the rest of the episode and into the next before Tony gives in to an urge May suspects he's been suppressing since he walked in the door and saw what she had on.

"That's so bullshit. That science is _so bullshit_. Like that is _so_ fake, you have to know-"

"Shhh." May turns sideways, dislodging his hand, and tosses her legs up onto the couch. They cross his lap now, a move of brazen familiarity she would not have, a year ago, predicted she would pull with Iron Man . The thought, in addition to a moment of low impulse control she feels confident in blaming on her illness, she adds, "I used to change the channel whenever you came up, you know."

"I'm sorry, _how_ is that relevant to-"

" _Shhh_."

Having just shushed an Avenger, May refocuses on her show. She's seen all of these episodes before, several times, having a guilty-pleasure soft spot for them, and the level to which it torments Peter - and evidently Tony as well - to witness the kind of scientific inaccuracies CSI is known for is just an added bonus. Peter always makes an extremely amusing face when they enhance images past what is physically possible, and it would seem that, watching him out of the corner of her eye, what gets Tony is improbable fingerprints in improbable places.

Time passes in the way time seems to pass when one is sick, alternatingly peanut-butter slowly and the kind of fast where you blink and you've watched two and a half episodes of CSI without realizing it. Tony continues to push orange juice and meticulously timed doses of Tylenol on May, at one point getting up and retrieving a small trash can from the other side of the room to clear the snowdrifts of tissues that had accumulated around her. He supports her through two more coughing fits, and keeps his despair over her choices in television to a minimum.

(This after the second coughing fit was precipitated by what is apparently 'the most egregiously bullshit chemical composition analysis in the history of the fucking universe, oh my god, how do they _live_ with themselves', and Tony's absolute outrage thereabout, at which May laughed so hard she ended up nearly hacking up a lung.)

He leaves a couple of times to check on Peter, bringing him his own doses of over-the-counter meds. Peter's always slept a lot when he's sick. He gets tired and clingy, and it's easy to manage, comparatively. May is nonetheless glad for the backup, not having to set a timer to remind herself to check on him, or bring him medicine. It's hard enough to remember what day it is and what Tony is doing in her apartment, which is exactly why she'd asked him to take Peter to begin with. She's not mad about the way that request has gone, though she hadn't predicted it. All in all, this is perhaps the best possible outcome. It's the best she's felt while either she or Peter were sick since before Ben died.

Eventually, Tony heaves a sigh and pushes off the back of the couch, sitting up straight. He lifts May's legs from where they've once again ended up over his lap, standing and depositing them back on the couch with a pat on her shin. Rather than corral her sandpaper throat into cooperating with speech, May settles for raising an eyebrow at him.

"It's dinner time," he explains. Her eyebrow goes higher, and Tony glances towards the clock. "By dinner time I mean a time at which dinner is going to happen. And by dinner I mean heating up the chicken dumpling soup I stuck in the fridge when I got here. Be back in a jiff, I'm just gonna stick it on the stove. Then I'll see if I can roust Peter and convince him to eat something."

As if his name being spoken aloud had summoned him, Tony is barely halfway to the kitchen when the boy in question makes an appearance. May watches her nephew sleepily shuffle out of the hallway, looking as disoriented and pathetic as their shared illness, in her expert opinion, definitely warrants. She feels her heart do a familiar sharp squeeze, affection for Peter abruptly overtaking her for a moment.

Tony, upon noticing who's entered the scene, redirects his path around, guiding Peter to sit on the couch. He sits himself, one steadying hand on Peter's shoulder.

"Hey kid," he says, and the warmth in his voice makes May's heart constrict all over again. "How're you feeling?"

Instead of answering with words, Peter groans. Tony is stifling a very thinly veiled laugh, obviously amused by his response, but May feels like she can relate. That's about where she's at, too. Tony tries to get Peter to talk for a little longer, giving up when Peter barely responds. He seems completely taken aback when, with no warning except another wordless groan, Peter slumps forward into Tony's chest. His eyes are closed, partially curled up, his cheek pressed to the front of Tony's band shirt. May is familiar with this experience, with the terrifying and priceless too-warm weight of a sick kid seeking reassurance, but Tony himself seems completely blindsided.

"Is this… normal?" he asks, frozen still, much in the way of a nature documentary host suddenly confronted with an unpredictable and venomous animal.

"He's always like this," May confirms. She is, for her part, highly entertained by this development. "Every time."

"Okay, well." For lack of any other option seemingly available to him, May watches Tony incrementally relax back against the cushions of the couch. Peter goes with him, boneless and completely out of it. "Dinner can, uh. Dinner can wait, I guess." He raises his arms after several long moments, wrapping them around the sick kid laying against him. May nods, reaching her own hand over to brush Peter's shoulder, her thumb stroking over the back of his neck.

On the screen, the title card flashes again, and the room is bathed in a green glow, to the sound of The Who's 'Who Are You'. May makes no move to stop it, and the show plays on.


End file.
